This cold, this unbelievable Belarusian cold was still inside him when Ibrahim Asaad sat on his seat in the Iraqi Airways plane, from Minsk to Erbil, back home. So he told the reporter five days later in a Whatsapp call from the capital of the autonomous region of Kurdistan. He is now sitting cross-legged between his friends in a room furnished with thin mattresses under neon light, they smoke shisha and drink cans of Coke. The other young men are happy that Ibrahim is back. “In between, when he didn’t get in touch for almost two weeks, we thought he wouldn’t survive,” says one of them.
Belarus refugees: Ibrahim Asaad’s odyssey – politics
